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Overclock your Arduino with liquid nitrogen

Uh.... Yeah I know right ?

After initially overclocking the Arduino to 32.5mhz, Mikhail started experimenting with pushing the Arduino further. First he was able to up the supply voltage to 8V and nudge it up to 37mhz. It’s a commonly known trend in the pc overclocking world that you can usually overclock further with more cooling. So without ramping up from things like water cooling, Mikhail jumps into super-cooling the Arduino with liquid nitrogen.

Liquid nitrogen is around -196 degrees Celsius. With the liquid nitrogen bath, he was able to get the Arduino running to just over 65mhz. At this point the looped test sketch running on it started failing. But before getting that far, from previous tests he ran into issues with the Arduino’s brown out detection. After replacing some of the capacitors and disabling the blown-out fuse and moving the LCD’s power supply away from the Arduino he was good to go.

You know the best part of this hack, and always my favorite is that it’s for the hell of it. This is obviously not something you would put into production or have any real application, that’s why it’s awesome.